Picture of Lynn Stauffer

Dr. Lynn Stauffer

Professor and Chair, Computer Science Department
Director, Academic Resources and Planning, School of Science & Technology
Director, SSU MESA (Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement) Program
Sonoma State University

Office: Darwin 116D
Phone: (707) 664-2268
Email: lynn.stauffer@sonoma.edu


Fall 2009 Welcome Greetings from the CS Chair


MESA logo

MESA is an academic program that supports educationally disadvantaged students to attain four-year degrees in science fields. MESA Centers are located at UC, CSU, and independent university campuses. MESA provides rigorous support through a variety of components and reinforces these components through establishment of a peer community based on academic achievement. This community provides students, most of whom are first in their family to go to college, with mutual support and motivation. This academic community is what sets MESA apart from other programs. Learn more by visiting the SSU MESA website.


Fall 2009 Schedule

Office Hours
Monday 1:00-2:00pm, Tuesday 1:00-2:00pm, Wednesday 10:00-11:00am, Thursday 2:00-4:00pm or by appointment. Contact the CS Administrative Coordinator, Gina Voight (gina.voight@sonoma.edu, (707) 664-2667), to schedule an appointment.

Academic Advising
Contact the CS Administrative Coordinator, Gina Voight (gina.voight@sonoma.edu, (707) 664-2667), to schedule an appointment.

CS 101 Intro to Computers and Computing
Lab 02 Monday 10:00-11:50pm Darwin 25 (Lecture M & W 9:00-9:50am in Ives 101)
Lab 16 Thursday 11:00-12:50pm Darwin 25 (Lecture T 11:00-12:50pm in Ives 101)

CS 497 Internship

Picture of student Joe Andresen throwing pie at Dr. Stauffer







Computer Science major, Joe Andresen, throws pie at Dr. Stauffer as part of Math Club's Pi Day festivities 2007. (That's Dr. Stauffer behind the paper plate.) Joe paid extra to get close up and personal.

Educational Background

Dr. Stauffer received her Ph.D. from the Information and Computer Science Department at the University of California, Irvine.


Research

Dr. Stauffer's primary research interests are in the design and analysis of algorithms and data structures. She is particularly interested in the field of data compression. She has also worked with undergraduates doing research in programming languages, expert systems, database design and most recently computational geometry.

Data compression attempts to reduce the size of an input file by removing redundancy and is useful in many storage, communication, and security applications. One area of Dr. Stauffer's research considers parallel data compression where data is manipulated simultaneously by a collection of parallel processors. Her work includes compression methods on the systolic array and Xnet parallel machine models. On the Parallel Random Access Machine (PRAM), a theoretical model of parallel computation, Dr. Stauffer has published work on sublinear-time compression and she is investigating the extension of these research findings to include other existing computational models.


Other Interests

Sonoma State Univerity Student Chapter of the ACM
More information can be found at the Computer Club website.

Women in CS Group (WICS)
This informal group works to support women in the computer science program at SSU. Gatherings are held approximately every month with a loose topic for discussion. Previous meetings have focused on issues and coping strategies for women in computer science. See WICS.